So what we're looking for is we're looking for, We're taking all these crops that have seeded and grown and have come to fruition. They've grown up and now it's time to harvest. And so we're harvesting them and bringing them into church formation. We're bringing them together and unifying them under the idea of being a body of believers, a local church fellowship. And so understanding a biblical formation and function and purpose of a church. Biblical guidelines for healthy churches. Evaluation of existing churches within networks. So this would get back to that, are there existing churches that are within In the immediate area of the church, you know, the church went to the person out there saying, okay, how do I evaluate them for if they're stable, if they're faithful, if they're biblically sound, for the possibility of incorporating or connecting them? And then thinking about the next steps of spiritual or church formation. Now, as I mentioned, by church formation, I prefer thinking about it as a fellowship of believers or body of believers. Because so oftentimes when out of the country and you say the church or planting a church, as I mentioned earlier today, there's this thought or notion that it involves certain resources, certain structures, certain things. Like there's requirements that would come with being considered a new church. You know, land that's been purchased, a building that's been built. You know, any number of times being out of the country being asked to help potentially raise funds to build a building or finish building a building and very clearly we just say that's not what we do. We're not here to help you to build a building. We're not here to help you raise money to build a building. If within your network, within your body, there's resources provided that lend towards finishing a building or building a building, then you make that decision as unto the Lord for how you use those resources. But that's not what our role is. And again, you know, and we'll tell them, again, our role is not to employ you or to have guys that we're, you know, we're covering all their resources and making sure, you know, they, you know, those kinds of things. We do have regional coordinators in our countries that work with us, that we partner with. that we do provide them and offset their cost for internet so that way they can communicate with us. And a small gift that would say as you're traveling, as you're printing materials, here's resources that you would use for that. Not dependent upon us to feed their family, not dependent upon us for their livelihood, but we're saying as you're working for us, as you're serving with us, we don't want you to take your family's resources to, you know, to buy gas to go out to do a training or to, you know, to print materials in order to have for the trainees. But in no means do we have people that we say are catalyst staff, where their sole support of income is with us. That's creating dependency, and that's a problem, and that's what you were referring to earlier today, is that when you create a dependency upon outside resources, again, one of those evaluatory questions, utilizing insiders for the facilitation of the work. and finding, making sure that that's what's taking place as these guys are going out in church formation. And so we're very clear about that on the front end. And, you know, we've had individuals that engaged us and wanted to train with us and very quickly into the relationship, the online relationship. the ideas of money or resources or provision. And when we're very clear about what we don't do, we've had some of those relationships end. And that's fine. I mean, we're not out there trying to, that's not our goal. I mean, our goal is to take guys that want to be deeply rooted, and biblical foundation and church planting. And so that's part of why our process of beginning now in a new training site starts the way it starts, where we're saying to any potential place, hey, you're gonna meet with us online for however long we want. I mean, we haven't set a timeline before we even think about coming and committing to some kind of relationship. And even then, we're saying at some point, if we see some reproduction of this, and you're telling us about what you're doing, what we would say is we'll take an opportunity, we'll find some resources to come, meet with you, see what you're doing, put eyes on it, make sure everything seems right, trust in the spirit of God to lead us, and if it's the case, then we'll consider a partnership. But for example, the guy in Nepal, we started in December, We've been training now, just finished up module one, the same module, been training with him online. We'll move into module two, and we've been talking about how he's gonna reproduce it, and he's got some ideas, and he's beginning to have some conversations with some of the folks, and we're working through some of the challenges that he has because of just past instruction. One of the questions he asked me, he said, how big is the group needed to be? I said, well, we're saying we want a group no bigger than about 25 pastors. He said, oh, that's completely different than anything we've ever done here before. I said, I bet it is. My guess is it's come one, come all, and we want everybody who can get here to get here. But most of those are centered around a one-time hit, right? We're gonna study this book together, and this is gonna be their theological foundation. And I think we're shown that our desire is to cultivate an ongoing relationship that is longer and deeper than just a one-time, here it is, kind of approach. So we're talking through that and he's like, oh, that's going to be completely different. I'm like, yeah. And so but he's he's he gets our model. And so what I'm saying to him is, look, man, if the Lord provides and we can move in this direction, maybe later this year, thinking about August, because of my travel schedule, maybe in August. I would go to Nepal, visit with him, see what he's been doing, see what work's going on, and be prayerfully considering that maybe, if possible, into 2020, right, so now we're almost a year and a half removed from when we first started with him, before we would even make any kind of physical commitment to being in country with him. If he rides that with me and he's faithful to reproduce, then I feel comfortable soliciting resources and partnerships from local churches here in the States to partner with us to go to Nepal, right? So that's what we're thinking about as we're thinking about church formation. And so, Question, key question, how do I form a church? Oh, I know where I was going with that. The idea of a body of believers or a fellowship of believers, as opposed to defining just saying a church, because of what that, even that little phrase means to so many different cultures out there. So, you know, that's just a, that's somewhat of a personal preference for me, referring to it that way. The task is not solely dependent upon the church planter. It is the Lord who's establishing, it's God who's establishing the church within His timing. So again, the Holy Spirit, right? We're saying, we're identifying where He's at work. Who God's already called out of those people to bring them unto Himself through repentance and faith, which I think we would all agree is necessary for true biblical salvation. Nobody magically gets saved. there must be repentance and faith that has to take place for true salvation to exist. So how do we form a church? That's the question that we're trying to help teach these potential church planters so that way they would have an idea, okay, when I'm going into my new field, here's the end, here's what I'm looking to get to at the end of my time. or not into my time, but what my end goal is in this new field. It's answering questions like, well, what is a church? What does the church do? These are some of the basic strategic questions that we might go, oh, those are pretty easy, right? Pretty self-explanatory. We know the answers to those. Well, sometimes we need to be careful if we just take things for granted when we're out of the country and in other cultures. Because they may not rightly understand some of those kinds of things. So we take time to sort of pursue through those answers to help them understand healthy church identity, right? So you see those passages there, that would be one of those self-discovery times. Hey, take these five passages, read them, and then find out what is the scripture teaching us as the description of a healthy church, all right? So as we're thinking about that, and there's a second discovery there, out of Acts 2, 41 through 47, Acts 11, what do healthy churches do? What are their functions? So on the front end, hey, think through this. What do you discover? Self-discover. Remember, we want to evaluate everything we're doing. I don't want to just come in there and say, okay, here's what the Bible teaches about a healthy church. One, two, three. Because now I've not helped these trainees become self-discoverers. Now, you say, well, that's not part of your church formation. Yeah, but I want to equip them to be so that way they can then equip others to do the same thing, right? Reproducing what I want them to do. So if I say, OK, let's go to these passages, take some time. read them, come together, we're going to dialogue, we're going to talk about what these say. And then I can get around to sort of helping facilitate the discussion and lead it down the direction I want to go. But I want to equip them to be able to understand the word. I don't want a model where they're just sitting there waiting for me to give them the answer. And we don't want to just be trainers that are just spoon-feeding, if you will, these trainees. I look at it as we're facilitators. We're helping to facilitate and guide discussion and training and teaching towards truth. If they're self-discoverers and they come back with something that's way off the wall, now I have the opportunity to say, well, hold on. Where did you come up with that? Why did you think that? Instead of me just giving them answers and then one day if they do get out there and they read it for themselves and they come up with some other random thought, they've just only heard what I've said and they've not really participated in studying and learning and in dialoguing. So I want them to do that so when we come to that place, they're at a much better level of being able to do that on their own than just simply be dependent upon me. Okay, so we're thinking about healthy churches. Thinking about the organism of the church that would create health, what does it look like? Thinking about the idea of the house of peace, the man of peace, and seeing these kind of come to fruition. So there's two sets of five questions, if you will, that we facilitate. The first one on there, tools for the trainer, a guide to healthy churches. Five questions that must be answered in the mind of the man of peace as he begins hosting a new church. So we've gone into a new community, we've gone into a new village, and we're seeing a body coming together with disciples that are being made. We're forming this body into a local fellowship to meet together. And so the questions to ask then are, who is the church? When do we meet? Where do we meet? Why do we gather? And what do we do? Just simple questions. We want to help facilitate these to the trainees because as they're training others who are going to briefly be going out and reproducing this, they need to have a right foundation on what is the church, who is the church, and just basic ideas of when and how, or excuse me, when they meet, where they meet, those kinds of things. So as we get to question one, who is the church? Now, Scripture teaches us very clearly that there is a right understanding that as a born-again believer, you're a part of the body of Christ, or the bride of Christ, the people of God, God's household. I think we would all agree that being a repentant and in faith believer makes you a member of the body of Christ. Whether you like the idea of universal church or not, that concept of you're a member of the kingdom, right? Every one of us is a member of the kingdom of God. We're a part of the body of Christ, the bride of Christ. When Christ returns, but we won't get into eschatology, but so there's that aspect of it, okay? But when we're defining the church, we're defining a body of believers or a fellowship of believers, I think the next step beyond that then is we see in Acts 2.41, those who accepted his message were baptized and were added to their number about 3,000 that day. So when we think about the local body, yes, you can be a member of the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, but to be considered a member of the church or a church, there has to be a baptized confession or a baptism into the fellowship of the body of believers. So when we want to define the church, we're saying the church, the local expression of the church is a group of baptized believers into like fellowship. They are being baptized into fellowship together, identifying with Christ. being baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So there is a confession with the mouth and the belief in the heart, and then there's a walking in obedience into being baptized into that fellowship, an identity with him. I identify with this fellowship. Now we've constituted, it's a group of baptized believers who are in like fellowship together. So, you know, people ask the question, well, can I be a Christian and not go to church and all those kind of things? And we all know those patented answers. Yes, you can be a member of the body of Christ as this thief on the cross was without being a member, without being connected to the local church. Now, is that, do we encourage that? I would say no. Does that appear to be what Jesus allows for outside of, inside of scripture? Well, no, it appears that what he's saying is, Through the making of disciples, there is an act of obedience that says, I identify with this body and I do that through a confession and repentance and walking through obedience and baptism. To say, I'm identifying with them. Now what we're doing is we're putting sort of, we're making this sort of ambiguous idea of the universal thing something more local and more tangible and saying it's this group that's been baptized into fellowship together. And the necessity of that, I think, comes out of what Jesus says when he says in Matthew 28, to baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. When we find an axe, what happens is they believe and they're baptized. I think this connection between the two is not, we all agree, it's not salvific, but it's for identification for the purpose of church formation. Otherwise, we just got people out there and we're just like, well, who knows what's going on? But if we can bring it together and say, okay, we've been baptized into light fellowship together, And we've identified ourselves as a fellowship. And we've done that not just through a confession of our mouth or saying what we believe in our heart, we've done it through an act of obedience through the waters of baptism. So helping to understand, helping them to understand that who is the church, that the local body, right, the fellowship of believers is a group of baptized believers who've accepted the message and have walked in obedience into baptism. And so I think that's why really it's imperative that we do put a lot of emphasis upon the necessity of baptism, not for salvation, which we would all agree upon, but for not just even an act of obedience to the command of Christ, but to identify with the body of believers that we're saying we want to be a member of. That that local body is the expression that Christ uses to then reproduce what he's doing. It all facilitates through the church. And so, who is the church? It's a group of baptized believers. who have followed through in obedience to what Christ has commanded. And so we want to be clear to identify that or to declare that so there's no misunderstanding. It's a recognizable membership. of connection that is a result of baptism, okay? And so, again, from each one of these questions, I believe there's usually some further passages that you could use for discussion, if you're teaching this, to help them to understand where you're headed in answering the question of who. Now, second question. When do we meet? Culturally, this is something that we would all say, well, traditionally, we meet on Sunday mornings because it's the first day of the week, and Jesus rose on the first day of the week, and this is when we meet, right? Sunday at 8.30 or 9 or 10 or 11, whatever time your service is. Well, okay, so for us, we want to be careful because that's a cultural norm. That's not a prescriptive passage of any kind that tells us when we have to meet. So this is that hermeneutical principle of descriptive versus prescriptive that we talked about earlier. There are passages that are very descriptive. They describe things for us. There are passages that are prescriptive. They prescribe things for us that are exactly the way they need to be. When you baptize someone, you baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That's pretty prescriptive when Jesus is talking about that out of Matthew 28. Descriptive says, For example, when does the church meet? Hebrews 10 says, let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as is the habit of some are doing, but let us encourage one another, and all the more, as you see the day approaching. Descriptive. So when do we meet? Regularly. Regularly. There's no passage I can point to that we can point to that says you have to meet on Sunday at 11 a.m. It's just very clear that the church meets and needs to meet as a body regularly. In some cultures, it might be that Tuesday at four o'clock is the most culturally appropriate time for the body to meet to worship, the body to meet together. That's fine. It might be Monday night. It might be Saturday mid-afternoon. I don't know. But what we want to share as we're teaching is that, and this is where we found the same traditional thing outside the country where it has to be at this time and these things. And if you just trace back a lot of that, a lot of that comes because of Western missionaries that have come in and said, here's how you do church. One of the saddest realities for me is when I'm in another country, I don't know if you've experienced this or not, when I'm in a country that's not a native English-speaking country and we listen to them sing or participate in some worship and they sing Western English hymns. It's like it's not natural. It's very unnatural to me. But when they start singing in their native tongue to some even tune, even if it's not a hymn, if it's a tune that they've put together and they sing it in their native tongue and they're playing their djembe or whatever their little instrument is. I had some video when I was in South Sudan. I mean, they have some of the weirdest instruments or strangest instruments, but, and they're just singing songs that are native to them. I'm like, this is natural. Any more than it would be unnatural for us to sing, in their native tongue, a song. It would be unnatural. So, for me, these cultural things are when, in the past, it's come in and we've said, well, you have to meet on Sunday, and you have to do it at this time, and your services look like this, and it's been very much led by efforts. And again, I don't think it's all It's not mean-spirited, you understand? I'm not bashing decades of work out of the country. What I am saying is I think it's just been unfortunate that we've not seen it be more organic and indigenous. And so when I'm there and I hear them singing, between a session or in the morning, they sing an indigenous song to their drum or their beat or their dancing, I try my best to participate and look foolish. But then when they get done, I said, I want you to know, I said, this is the kind of worship I love to hear when I'm out of the country. Are you a similar experience? And so when we meet, And when we're there, it just needs to be communicated just regularly. Don't forsake the regular gathering. When you do it, it doesn't matter. I mean, there's no precedent on when it needs to take place. So we just want to be clear. Many cultures are not as time-oriented as we are. You know, being in Senegal a couple weeks ago, now in Nigeria, they are very good with time, I will give them that. But in Senegal, not so much, because we'd start training at four, and at 4.30, a couple more people would come in, 5 o'clock, a few more come in, 6.30, 7 o'clock, some more coming in, and I'm thinking, oh my gosh. I want to start over on the night because some of you missed the first hour and a half. They're not time-oriented cultures. I mean, Indonesian culture is not so much time-oriented culture. Now some people are, like one of our contacts here was trying to keep everybody on point. And I've not been, Walter, would you say South Central American time-oriented? Probably not, huh? Not usually. I've not been to South and Central America with our organization. I've been there some for other missions and stuff. So we just have to be careful cross-culturally, right? When we're communicating, when does the church meet? It would be in our, maybe in our DNA to say, well, we meet on Sunday because it's the Lord's Day or something. And so the answer really needs to be just a regular meeting. Once per week even that even that, you know, I'd be careful to to make that legislative You know restriction say, you know, if it's regular for you you guys want to get together two times a week man to do it if it's preventative because of money or whatever reason, maybe it's once every two weeks, I just think there needs to be a regular meeting. Don't forsake the regular gathering of the believers. And we want to make sure that we're careful not to lay upon different cultures what our culture says is normative. So, when do we meet? We're just trying to help them understand it on a regular basis. Where do we meet? Where do churches meet? The answer to this question, the New Testament, I think sets a precedent for us. And this is, again, this one lady also that in Senegal had a challenge with me because as we talked about this in the introductory part, just saying, you know, there's not the necessity of having land and building. We've placed that as a restriction or requirement on where we meet. a central location where everybody comes from wherever we're coming from to gather together. Now, here, where we have vehicles and there's capability of doing that, it's not a challenge or a burden. That's what we've established as the norm. You know, and maybe even that's, maybe even that, and our culture needs to be evaluated as to what that looks like, you know, when it comes to resources and expending of resources and time. But what we find New Testament-wise, and I think it's just really more applicable when we think about other cultures, is Acts 2 and following, I think, shows us that what was taking place is they're meeting in homes. Now, that's primarily because that was what they had. It seems that they would come to the temple to meet together, to gather together, but the primary meeting time was in the homes. When there's elders being appointed by Timothy in Ephesus, he's appointing elders, I believe, over the house fellowships that existed within the region. And it wasn't that Timothy was just floating around house by house. I think he was appointing leaders. with some strategic oversight as appointed by Paul over the church of Ephesus. As I told you in synagogue, that was what I encouraged these guys to be thinking about, some sort of urban, house-related fellowship model of church planting. You don't have to get everybody into this one place. but you stay connected as you're raising up leaders and placing, okay, we're gonna plant you here to do this model, we're gonna plant you here to do this model, because we've strategically thought about the city or the village or the town or the whatever, and so we're making a plan, okay, we wanna get into this area, and so we need to raise up a believer who can go, or some believers to go into this area and to plant themselves and find a house of peace, et cetera, or maybe it's because they already have a relationship, All right, John, you have family here, we wanna raise you up, prepare you, send you over to them, plant you there. And you're gonna stay connected, we're all gonna stay connected, right? And we're gonna have this sort of model of church planting. But maybe it's a shade tree. Maybe it's the backyard, I don't know. Again, being careful not to say, well, you have to have a building to go and meet in. If you're gonna be a church, you have to have a place. And so to say that if it's a A-frame shed with no walls, okay, whatever it needs to be. The idea again is sustainability and reproducibility. If what and how we lead them to when they meet and where they meet cannot be reproduced without outside resources and assistance, then it doesn't need to take place. Because if we do that, now we've created that dependency again, where we say, oh, if this guy's gonna go plant a church, he's gotta find money or he's gotta find a way to buy land and buy the supplies and build a building. Now, you're not hearing me say that that should never happen. I'm not saying that you can't have a building that they use as a place of worship. But if that becomes the primary focus, if that says we can't be a church until We can't be a body of believers that fellowship together and worship together until now we have a problem. That's where I think we've crossed over and said, no, you don't have to have those things. So we want to be careful to say, you don't have to have a building. You don't have to have a meeting place, like a structure. Okay, so where do we meet? Wherever it works. Whatever is available. Whatever you could then send somebody out and reproduce in some other place. When we were in Burkina, we would meet under the tree, literally under the tree in the middle of the village. We were out in the bush, we were way out in the middle of nowhere. We weren't in an urban setting, so there weren't really many homes. The homes were just little clay huts. just barely enough space for you to lay down. They didn't even cook inside them, they cooked outside. In the urban city, you got people in super tall buildings and really cramped apartments, so having small house fellowships just, in my opinion, makes sense. 10 or 15 over here, 10 or 15 over there, 8 or 10 over here. I'm in Bangladesh. When I've been in Bangladesh, that's the way they do it. They meet in house fellowships. And they cram. And they cram a lot of people in these houses, little apartments. But that's where they meet. And they meet regularly. And that's what they do. And I mean, we're in a bedroom, basically like a bedroom in a hallway area. And people are sitting on the bed. And they're sitting on top of people. But that's where they meet. And that's indigenous, that's reproducible for them. And so, again, thinking about this this idea this model and I think that's where and I've kicked it around with Doug and Brian about do we want to even put something in here that would give some sort of potential models of church planting so hey you know thinking about like this type of model or that type of model you know this urban thing we're talking about to include that this material just to give them some ideas to help them rethink or help think through their church planning strategy so it doesn't have to include maybe breaking down some of the preconceived ideas that they've had in the past. So where do churches meet? Fourth question, why do we gather as a church? Why do we gather as a church? The one primary motive. We gather together to be instructed, to be equipped for the work of the ministry. Just simply, just one simple answer to why the church gathers together. To be equipped to proclaim godliness for the work of the ministry. So 2 Timothy 3, to be instructed, to be trained, to be equipped, Ephesians 4, for the work of the ministry. That's why we gather, we don't gather for any other purpose. I think that's what Paul is being very clear about when he's writing to the Church of Ephesus. That's the purpose of their gathering, the motivation behind their gathering together. Now, don't misunderstand that what does a church do when they gather? That's the functionality we'll talk about. Some people might, why do you gather? Well, we gather to worship. Well, that's a function of your gathering. The motivation or the motive or the purpose behind you gathering is to be equipped for the work of the ministry. You're there, you worship together, fellowship together, pray together, give together, you do all that, you listen to God's word from the apostles teaching together. Why are those the functions? Those are the functions because you're being equipped to then go out and do the work. It's a very anti-seeker sensitive idea. where we're thinking, well, we meet so we can evangelize the lost. Well, not really. That's not what the scripture teaches us. Now, that's not to say that our preaching shouldn't be gospel-centric, right? The gospel should be present in our teaching. One of the classes I'll be teaching for Bethlehem this spring is biblical communication. And they have us reading, or have the students reading, Marita's book, Keller's book on preaching, and then Haddon Robinson. Keller's book and Marita's book are really quite good. It's been a while since I read a preaching book, a book on preaching. And it's been good to sort of re-engage with that type of literature and just be reminded that all preaching has to be Christiocentric, has to be gospel-centered. And so, We don't do that by just, you know, by going to Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection every Sunday. We do that by having unifying redemptive themes in our preaching. So if I'm preaching on, and I'm talking about the function of the local church, and I'm reading through the basics of what we see in Acts 2, and I'm talking about worship as it expresses itself through the apostles' teaching, through prayer, through fellowship and breaking of bread, how do I unify that? I unify that by saying this is worship. And I talk and I would connect that to saying, man, I can imagine what it must have been to have been an Old Testament Israelite Jew whose worship existed through the sacrificial system and just the burden of what they went through in that model. And then I say, you know what? Man, think about Christ and what he's done. He's liberated us. So now our worship is free just to bask in Him. that He fulfilled all of that. So no longer is our worship about having to engage in these things, but now it's about the freedom we have in Christ. So in preaching, in redemptive preaching, it's not about missing the gospel and saying, well, I've just got to drive home hard points to the people. It's about teaching them the gospel from all passages. But that's why we gather, is to be equipped. Part of that equipping comes through worship, comes through prayer, through all those means. Now, as I was gonna say, we're not gonna preach the gospel in your services. I mean, if the Lord has brought some lost people, if your people have brought lost people to the body to your time of worship, you certainly wanna be gospel-centered in your preaching and allow the Holy Spirit to move in their lives. And you don't know where they are in that understanding of the gospel, That's not our primary motive. It should not be our primary motive. We should be there to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. So I want to encourage that as I'm teaching these potential church pastors. Question number five, what does the church do? And this is the functionality of the church. Just a simple list of activities. Again, using Acts 2, 38 through 47 as a list of those. She, the church, what does she do? She calls people into decision by sharing the gospel. The church, we see that initiating work of the baptism of believers into fellowship, committing to teaching and instructing, fellowshipping and loving each other. breaking our bread, the Lord's Supper, the fellowship meal together, praying together, giving. Yes? Right. Well, I think what we're talking about here is when we're sharing the gospel, like we talked about under the gospel presentation, we want to call people to a response. And so I think that even though we don't necessarily have the recorded idea until when they're asking of Peter in that passage in Acts chapter two, what should we do? I think that the idea that we're talking about here is when we're talking about sharing the gospel through the church, the function of the church is to be sharing the gospel, in calling people to a decision. So it's using the principle out of verse 38, not necessarily saying it's exactly what Peter did, but the idea that we find from Peter, from that verse. Does that make sense? Okay. So fellowship, breaking bread, prayer, giving to the needy, meeting regularly, praising God, right? So we're just taking the principles out of what we see from the local, from the body there in Acts chapter 2, and we're saying, hey, here's what the church does. Here's what we do. The functions are the elements of the church. We're meeting together for the purpose of being equipped. What we're doing, right, what we're doing is these other things that we're talking about. You can break it down into bigger categories. You can say there's worship, there's fellowship, there's mission and discipleship. You can break the category down however you want. but sliding these functions underneath there is saying this is what she does, this is what the body does. We think about unity, caring for the needy. We found in the first century that early church that what they were doing is they were giving so that no one would have need, there was meeting of needs, there was the ability to do that, probably because there wasn't a whole lot of expense and need for resources and other things. you know, just hypothetically speaking, if we had house churches and we weren't having to facilitate for facilities and bills and all those things, would there be other resources that would be available? to meet needs, right? Now, I'm not, I mean, we're inside the building right now. I'm not saying that that's not, I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just asking the question, if those demands did not exist, would there be freedom, more freedom, to be able to do some of those kinds of things? As we're instructing, as we're helping to lead some of these church planting and these ideas cross-culturally, that's part of what we're trying to communicate. That's partly why they were able to do what they were able to do. And they had people like Barnabas that were selling property and giving it so that they would have needs, could meet needs and take care of the needs of the people in the body. But they also weren't having to cover a whole lot of other expenses. So we're thinking about this idea of these first five questions of a guide to healthy churches, right, that we're looking for and trying to encourage as we're training. Now, a mature church, the next sort of section in church formation is trying to say, okay, what does that mature church look like? What are the staple ideas, elements? Well, number one, they have to understand, as we all understand, that the church has one head. These are necessary for not just maturity and health, for longevity, but also for authenticity of the church. Christ is the head of the church. Now, you might think, well, that's strange, that's not a big deal, we ought to gather that, except for James, when he was up in a place called, it's in Ivory Coast, I can't remember what the name of the city was at this point. He was teaching, and he was teaching on this module, and he got to talking about Christ as the head of the church, and the building, the church that they were meeting in, the pastor stood up and said, no, I'm the head of the church. right there in front of the meeting. And James said, well, no. And he took him to scripture. And that's why we're saying we want to base what we teach on scripture. He said, no, here's what the Bible teaches. Christ is the head of the church, that he has supremacy over all things, and the head of the church. And the guy did not accept. And after the training finished, he told James, he said, you're not welcome back here to the train again. So James contacts me. He's like, what do we need to do? I said, OK, well, where do we need to go? I mean, the guys, the rest of the trainees there were on board with James. They were like, yes, we agree. It was the pastor of the congregation of the church where they were meeting, just the place they were meeting. James said, I don't think we can go back there. I said, no, I don't think we need to go back there. We'll find somewhere else to go. And so it actually moved from this one town, I wish I could remember the name of it, to a place called Jokeway. which is not that much further away from the town where he was in, but it's actually a more strategic place for the pastors. It's like, okay, well, this makes sense, right? We would not agree that we would find it heartbreaking that this one pastor thinks he's the head of the church, and it's not as uncommon as we might think outside of our culture. or our context, where indigenous pastors, because they've seen it as a place of position or priority, see themselves as the head. I'm in charge. It's a very pope-ish type model when you think about what we see out of the country. I'm the spokesperson of God. I'm the one who speaks for God. And there's a very belittling or at least not encouraging of the priesthood of believers in the Word to be self-discoverers. And so we want to make sure that we're telling and we're clearly communicating that he is, according to 1 Peter, he's the chief shepherd. in that we're not needed in the sense of He can remove us and the body of Christ is going to continue on. And so being clear to communicate that to our potential church planters and reminding those that there's a great accountability that comes with pastoring and being in ministry. And the reminder of that is that Christ is the fullness of God and that he is the head of the church. So there's one head, there's also one authority. The church has one authority, it's the word of God. Okay, it's the Word of God. Now, to be careful, sometimes we communicate the fact that there's one authority, the Word of God, and then we connect the idea of being under the leadership or the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And I don't think we would ever wanna say that what we wanna do is try to make a dichotomy and say, well, there's two authorities. We wouldn't wanna say, well, there's the Word of God, then there's the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Because in some denominations, internationally, what you have is you have this sort of dualistic authority where the Holy Spirit can trump the Word, and if the Holy Spirit tells me to do something, it doesn't matter what God's Word says. And because I've created a system where, or a situation where I am the head and nobody can question me, since the Spirit of God told me that I'm, you know, I need to collect this much money from everybody, then Now, it doesn't matter what God's word says, and even if it did, I probably can't really understand it myself anyway, so I'm dependent upon this guy. And so the perversion and corruption that exists on the international church level, and we would consider a lot of that sort of the prosperity gospel, not a true gospel, but it's out there because of this model of saying, well, there's dual authorities. When the reality, there's one authority for the local church, it's the word of God. He gave it for us, and 2 Timothy tells us very clearly that it's all that we need. Now, the Holy Spirit's role connects. The Holy Spirit instructs, the Holy Spirit guides, the Holy Spirit gives help and interpretation. As the pastor, the church ministry leader is studying, preparing, and reading God's Word. So we do need the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to help us as we're studying God's Word. But it's not that there's the Holy Spirit and the Word of God that are separate authorities. There's the Word of God and the Holy Spirit is helping us to understand what we're reading so then we can be faithful in our preaching and interpretation. The Spirit of God will never contradict the Word of God. In a sense, they're sort of on parallel tracks, but they never cross each other. There's never gonna be one where the Spirit's gonna go against the Word, or the Word of God is gonna, would somehow say something that would be, you know, unbiblical of itself. And so, revelation then is tested upon itself. So scripture interprets scripture, okay? And so, there's one authority within the body. There are two servants. Now we're thinking about a healthy church, mature church, church that has longevity, a gospel-centered church, has two servants. There's the pastor and the deacon. The pastor and the deacon. New Testament words used to describe the servant, the pastor, we have shepherd, Ephesians 4, elder, Titus 6, overseer, Titus 1-7, It's one person with different functions or different roles, different aspects to what he does. The shepherd is a protector. He leads them, helps to guide them towards feeding them. Elder is somebody who has wisdom and discernment, is a man who's, as we would see, is temperate and not given to the addiction of wine or the assorted gain or all those qualifications we find there in Timothy. So an elder of is the idea of the pastor, and the overseer is the one who is sort of overseeing, or episkopon, or that idea of bishop who's watching over the flock, who is protecting in the shepherding sense, but is also sort of overseeing what's taking place. not having to have control over everything, but is watching over. So if there's someone who's maybe serving the church through some ministry of prayer or through some other ministry avenue, the pastor is sort of watching over that. Interesting, right? These believers to have responsibility, we want that. Remember we said that we want responsibility of our new believers, but the pastor is giving oversight. over the people, so it's not three functions, or excuse me, it's not three different roles, it's different functions of one role, that of the pastor. So the pastoral role is a role that internationally is something that sometimes is sought after, well, kind of jumping ahead to our practical, the idea of God's call to ministry. So the pastoral role can be something that people or men aspire to out of wrong motivation. And that's where the call to ministry, I think, is something that's important for us to communicate because, as we'll see, there's two ideas to the idea of the call, and one is the internal and one is the external. Internal being that, saying I'm motivated, I want to pursue this role, okay? But then there's the external, that's the body that's saying and identifying, we see in this young man, we see in this man the qualifications and the longing to pursue pastoral ministries. Yes? Affiliation. Right, right, yeah. Yeah. In my context, I have not. And in fact, in Nigeria, they would consider themselves to have a plurality of elders. In the Ivory Coast, we've not had any issue. Honestly, the only place where I've seen the major issue for that, from my standpoint, is here. Internationally, it's not an issue. In fact, it's welcomed. Yeah. Yeah, so I've found the deeper tension is trying to be more focused on more of a New Testament church planning model than it is so much about some of these other aspects to who is the church, the formation of the church, or that idea, then more so how do we begin a new work? And that's where I'm still trying to learn how to maneuver through that in a faithful way. Being faithful to what we think Scripture's teaching, but also in a sense trying to be aware of the denominational connection. I guess because when we're talking to these guys who would be regional coordinators and we're thinking about who we want to partner with, we're very careful about theological and doctrinal convictions. We're not working with what we would consider sort of unbiblical or doctrinally inerrant people or groups. When it comes to these kind of things, we're trying to be very careful because of that, we've already built that relationship with him. Yep. Yeah. in the Word. Yeah. We really don't get into much of the theology in Module 1. We're preparing some possible appendices that we want to attach to Module 1 that would give Brian's sort of called it core theology. It would be like just really basic. things that we would attach onto module one. I would say, Brandon, that part of the reason why, for us moving forward, is because who we're working with, we will have developed such a strong relationship with him that we could have a comfort level of even some of those major doctrinal, potentially heretical views before we got into that. which is probably why we're trying to do this really slow process before we jump into a new site. But there's a possibility of attaching a couple things on the backside of the module that would be sort of extra. And then certainly when we get into Old and New Testament, there's going to be doctrinal ideas that come out of that. And in our theology module, it's not systematic as biblical theology. more covenant maker, covenant keeper, kingdom of God aspects of biblical theology. Yep. One. This is the first one. Mm-hmm. Harmonics. We will. My plan right now, I'm going to Jacksonville in May, the church down there, and the guys are going with me to the Ivory Coast in July and doing this same thing on the Harmonoops module. So I will have it recorded like we're recording this to be able to send, but you guys are not far away. I mean, terribly far away. So to maybe set up another time, because that wouldn't be till November. Could be later in the year that we come over and do something like this with you guys. I'll be in Jacksonville, Florida. May, I fly on the 17th, training on the 18th. May 18th. I think that's right. Is that a Saturday? Mm-hmm. It's at First Baptist Grey Gables, or Grey Gables Baptist Church. Cody Page is the pastor there. From Rome, it'd probably be, yeah, it's just the full state of Georgia. Yeah, I plan to have four of these this year. I mean, not for, I mean, for different modules. My desire is to do this for every module. to have a recorded copy, right? But then I think we're also working towards possibly doing some sort of video recorded, a little bit more in depth, like maybe about 10 hours worth of training at the studio at Faith Bartlett and have it somewhat semi-professionally done. They've offered that up to us. And so we're thinking about doing that. So we would have like an audio copy of like a one-day thing and then possibly a video copy of like a little more involved training for Doug and I, Brian probably, or maybe some other guys if we got involved. Just teaching through it in a little more in-depth way like you're talking about this is really just a quick overview. And then we would have those multiple copies. and done half of it with the kind of pretend we don't know this stuff, you know, like when you're saying. That's a good evaluation and that's probably what I would need if you want to me or Doug send us an email say hey love the training or training was terrible do this different because it is our first one I mean you guys are guinea pigs clearly for this training I mean you're not clearly guinea pigs but I mean you know what I'm saying. Yeah, clearly metaphorically. But any kind of feedback that you can give us would be really helpful and I mean anything like that. What would it look like if we were there? Yeah. Right. Right. Sure. Right. Right. Yeah, that's that's good feedback. I think that'd be really helpful. Yeah, May 17th, 18th, I'll be down there. Okay, come on in. Florida, Jacksonville, yeah. My wife's from Alabama, that's about the only time I go back to Alabama. Church has one head, one authority, two services. We talk about pastor, we have the different aspects of the role of the pastor, how they're used interchangeably. You know, we read in 1 Peter 5 where he says, to the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ's sufferings, one who also will share in the glory to be revealed, be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers, not because you must, but because you are willing. So we see even in that passage, just sort of the interchangeable terminology that Peter uses there. So the second role that we have, or if you continue on the role of the pastor, Ephesians 4 there is to help equip the work, build the body of Christ, and so qualifications. Now we do have a practical module. One of the modules has the practical portion that deals with specifically qualifications of pastoral ministry or pastoral leadership. So we would talk about that when it comes to the New Testament module, because we're teaching through 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus, but then we would also have a practical portion to one of the modules, I don't remember which one it is, if it's New Testament or Biblical Theology, which one, that deals a little more in depth with those qualifications. So it might even be Old Testament, since we're doing call to ministry, and those would come second. Okay, the second role, or second servant is out of the deacon. All right, Acts 6-3. Would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word in order to wait on tables. Brothers, choose for yourselves. Seven, full of serenity and wisdom, will in turn, we will turn this responsibility over to him. Now, we're wanting to share with those that we're training The pastor and the deacon, and even the deacon, we look at and say, hey, similar qualifications. But what we want to try to be careful of is try to create this sort of dichotomy that says, well, the pastor's role, the pastoral role is elevated. and serving as a deacon or working in a business or restaurant and making disciples is a lesser thing, lesser role, lesser responsibility. So as we're communicating, we want to be clear that, and especially when we talk about the call to ministry later, to say that there's a uniqueness to what it means to be set apart and desire the role of vocationally serving the local church in ministry, is a unique thing, but it's not something that's to say that elevates me above other people. Now, again, this is that problem that exists when we, when, unfortunately, we've created this sense of, well, if you're the pastor, you're the, you know, that person, you have a, an elevated spirituality. You're much more spiritual or more godly than I am or we could ever be. So, as we're teaching through these servant ideas, we want to use as much of the common, sort of similar language as possible. The pastor is serving the body through shepherding. through being wise, discerning, and overseeing. And the deacons serving the body through the waiting of tables and meeting the needs throughout the body. And maybe if, you know, I know at times we have deacons that sort of serve, you know, different kind of hospitality or different roles as their area of service, but being careful not to elevate one role or even either role above the laity. I've seen so much of this, and again, I know this is in our context, but, and somewhat out of the country too, is that even the role of the deacon, when a church agrees to the two office roles, they see the role of the deacon as something to be attained for, right? I wanna be a deacon, I'm gonna, you know, it's seen as an elevated thing. A church I was a part of for a while was a new church that was starting and watched as they were electing deacons for the first time and seeing people sort of jockey for this role and some of them being brought into that role and then when others were not, they either left or were discouraged and walked away. Or when some people were elected into that role, you just kind of sensed that they kind of thought they had arrived somewhere. And for me, I think, you know what, the idea of the diaconate, yes, if we want to set apart some, to help give leadership so that way that the meeting of needs actually takes place and doesn't fall through the cracks, if you will. But why would we not all want, in some ways, consider ourselves to have a diaconate style of serving others? You understand what I'm saying? And so to appoint some, this wasn't to say, well, here's some elevated men. They appointed some, so that way the work actually got done. Because if we don't have somebody who's kind of in charge, then oftentimes it just sort of gets shuffled and passed off. It doesn't actually get fulfilled. So the role wasn't created in order to say, oh, well, here's some extra spiritual guides. You know, you got the pastor, then you got the deacon, then you got everybody else. It was to say, hey, let's make sure this gets done. The apostle said, look, our focus has to be on studying the word in prayer so we can feed the sheep, so we can shepherd and oversee and lead the people well. It's not that we're above serving, you know, tables and waiting. It's that our primary focus has to be this because it's our calling, it's our burden. Hey, let's appoint some guys or some folks to help lead out making sure that the serving of tables and the waiting and the orphans and that those needs get met. So yes, while it's a servant role within the body, we gotta be careful not to say, well, you know, there's this graded level of spirituality that comes because you're serving. And making sure that we see both roles being lived out. Okay, so we have Two servants, healthy churches, churches that we're looking for have four marks of maturity. Four marks of maturity. Any church planning book that you read is probably gonna have something similar to this in it. What we're looking for, we're looking for a church that's a healthy church, a maturing church, a church that maybe in some way we would say is, if she has some sort of connection to a mother church, is ready to be sort of set free in that regard. And so we're looking for four key marks of maturity. Number one is self-governing. Self-governing. These are really pretty self-explanatory. And the idea that she governs herself, that there's no outside influences, there's nobody outside helping to help manage or keep in line or to make decisions. So by self-governing, we simply mean a mature church has the capability of making decisions for itself. Self-governing. So, it's important because we want all of the priests or the believers to understand that they have responsibility in helping to govern and making decisions. So, you know, what we wanna understand is that we have that role of being able to make decisions within herself. Self-governing. Number two, self-supporting. We can help guide this along if we help establish a model that is a model that is geared towards sustainability and reproducibility. Self-supporting. Intrinsic motivation, why is this important? There's an intrinsic motivation when one perceives his or her ownership of the ministry. Now, you understand we're not saying that they have ownership as in it's our ministry, but where the local body, where that body of believer says, man, we're responsible for ourselves. We're responsible for supporting ourselves. We're not relying upon outside or other assistance. It's us, and it's relying upon us. There's a sense of ownership, a sense of pride that would come in that. It's like when I was growing up, if I was trying to raise money for a trip, a mission trip or something, if somebody just gave me money, hey, that was great. But if somebody called me up and said, hey, you come rake my yard and I'll give you some money, I'm like, man. But I tell you what, when I got done raking the yard, that guy's $100 meant more to me than the $100 the other person just gave me. Because there was something that I had stake in helping to raise that support. And so that's kind of what we're thinking about. We're saying they're self-supporting. You know, simple mathematics. If outside funds are necessary, if those outside funds dry up or leave or go away, then they can no longer function. You know, we were talking a little bit at lunch. You know, there's been, and as I've traveled, there's been times I've seen situations where, you know, missions organizations in the past have bought land or bought buildings or built buildings. As long as they were there, as long as the resources were coming and the buildings were maintained and the function of whatever the work could keep on going, whether it was an orphanage or school or hospital or whatever, but if there was never any preparation or training for them to be self-supporting, then when the resources or the personnel left, it all fell. The lady that we take my two boys to their dentist, their pediatric dentist, she's a very nice lady and I don't, we've had a few gospel conversations as much as we can when she's in there working and I try to be careful of that. But she has, she's developed a dental school or dental ministry in Haiti. And every time we go in, which is I guess once a year or twice a year, however times I take them in there, she's always going to talk about Haiti. She's always talking about how she's provided and provided and provided and collected and collected and collected. And she even said something to me this past year. She goes, I'm just not able to do as much as I was able to have been able to do. And she said, I'm afraid that that it may not be able to be sustained. And this was not a time for a missiological conversation. And my mom just thought, you're exactly right. It's not going to be able to be sustained if it's been dependent upon you. And she's like, yeah, in the years that passed, I've been able to send this much money down. And now I'm getting older. And she's much older. And she's like, I've had days I've not been able to work. And so I don't make as much. So I can't send as much. And I'm thinking, yeah, I mean, when your cash flow dries up, or the supplies or the machines you've sent down there break, and they have no way of knowing either how to fix them, or because it's all been provided, it's gonna last as long as that will last, and then it'll be over. That's not what we want. We also don't want one generation of church planting. And what I mean by that is we don't wanna planted church that says, hey, buddy, we planted this thing and man, we're done. Thank goodness we got that out of the way. We want to plant churches that want to plant churches, right? And who see themselves as saying, look, this is not about us and us growing bigger or better or better, but this is about us reproducing. So if we can be self-sustained, then what we can do is help you to create other self-sustaining or self-supporting So these are marks of maturity, alright? Self-reproducing, that's the idea we were just talking about there. The healthy church will multiply. Now, I mean, we're not saying it has to look a certain way or be a certain thing. We're just saying, man, reproduce yourselves. Whatever that looks like, if it's Christ-centered, if it's focused on these principles that we're talking about here, then it's what we're going after. So the healthy church will multiply. Maturity means a church will take ownership of the responsibility to evangelize, to disciple within its field, right, and then to reproduce itself either within that field, you know, or within that context or maybe beyond. Self-correcting. Self-correcting. simplify the for self by inserting the word correcting in the place of sort of theologizing. That is, we want the church to be able to identify some false teaching has come into where the body can say, no, that's not what the Bible is teaching. And they can correct themselves. It's identifying false teaching or false instruction, and not even always by purpose or intention. you know, we take it for granted, I think, sometimes, that our pastoral leadership and much of our leadership has been trained and equipped and has had, you know, or sat under the tutelage of good discipleship. And that's not always the case. And man, if you're out there, and this is what we found, is that 80% of the pastors in the Global South have little to zero theological education. So man, they're out there hammering it out. I would say the majority of them are not desiring to be, it may be false in their teaching or what we might even determine as heretical. They're out there working and maybe they've gone a direction because there were monies that were provided. Whatever the case may be, I don't think they're all intending to try to be false teachers. You know, any more than if I said, hey, I want to be a surgeon and I got out there and I read one book on surgery and I said, hey, I want to cut somebody open and try to, you know, fix their heart. I would never have killed him on the table intentionally, but it was my best intention to help him. I just, I didn't know. I've not been trained. Not saying you gotta send them to Bible school, right? Man, I would love to see, I would love to see, I got three degrees from, three theological degrees from two different schools, but man, the local church took on the responsibility of raising up and instructing, you know, and not that we put the schools out of business, but if we said, hey, you know, we're gonna raise up our own guys. We're going to instruct them, and teach them, and train them, and we're going to equip them, and we're going to give them practical ministry experience, and we're going to take on the responsibility, because that's what's going to have to happen here. These indigenous, international, self-reproducing churches are not going to be able to say, okay, well, this first generation was trained this way, but now we're going to start sending our guys to this Bible school to get their education. They're going to be self-training, self-reproducing, and they're going to have to be self-correcting. You know, we want to build relationships so we can be connected to them and help if they have questions. But man, by and large, it's going to be from within. And so what we're saying here is that we want them to be able to identify false teaching, be able to correct it on their own, and not to move into false teachings. What I've seen is when this happens internationally, it's because generally it's where the money's come from. You take an uneducated, untrained individual, and some cult, some false teaching says, well, hey, you know what? You should be prosperous, and you need to do this to get prosperous and make money. You need to do this. If you follow these teachings, this is what's going to happen. And man, because so much of the world is impoverished, and unfortunately, there's this buying into these false teachings because of following the money, which is another reason why we say, hey, we're not giving you money, because we don't want any of that connection. But a healthy church will be self-governing, self-supporting, self-reproducing, self-correcting. And then five functions. The church has five functions. And this is some of those from earlier broken down into these big categories. Worship, fellowship, ministry, mission, and discipleship. Matthew 22, 37 through 39 in this passage, Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. As the church functions, these are the two major commandment ideas we wanna see her accomplishing, loving God and loving others. Loving God and loving others. Again, these are the function of the church, right? We gather to be equipped. We gather together regularly to be equipped to go out and to engage in ministry and to go on mission and to be making disciples. And when we gather together, we're experiencing worship. And I would tell them, look, worship is not something you come and do one day a week. We gather together. to be equipped, but that's not our day of worship, that's not our time of worship, that's a time of corporate gathering to be equipped to go and do ministry. We should come collectively together having been in worship individually throughout the days and the week leading up to that time of corporate togetherness. I don't wait to come and pray when I get to church on Sunday morning. I've been in an attitude of prayer and praying throughout the week. So when I come collectively together with the corporate body, we're praying together in agreement. right, for what we've been praying about throughout the week. We fellowship together. I don't wait to fellowship on Sunday morning. I'm in fellowship or koinonia with those in my circle, in my week. So when I come together collectively as a body, we're offering fellowship unto the Lord, not in a one hour setting, but because of what we've been throughout the week. We break bread together or we have meals together, right? And then we want to worship God through singing, through giving, through praying, acts of obedience. And so what we're looking for is we're looking for a church who functions by having a regular opportunity for worship and gathering of worship, but who is instructing the people to be in worship throughout the week, daily. Again, that devotional idea, we're trying to connect to them and saying, we want you to be in God's word daily. All right? Fellowship, loving the body of Christ. Every believer has two kinds of neighbors. You have lost neighbors, you have saved neighbors. You got people around you who are brothers and sisters in Christ. You got people around you who are not. Love both. Love your believing neighbors. as brothers and sisters in Christ, as an identification of your knowing Christ, and then love your lost neighbors in a way that shows Christ's likeness, meaning, needs, whatever it may be that you can do to help you carry those burdens. So we fellowship. This is what the church does. She functions, she fellowships. Ministry to the lost. Okay, ministry, meeting the needs of the lost, reaching out to loss. This is where we're identifying those empty fields, where they might be, pockets throughout the community, the neighborhood, the city, the town, the village, whatever the case may be, and say, okay, how can we meet into there? How can we launch into there and minister to them? mission to go carry the message of Christ and discipleship. We're training up, teaching others to obey the commands of Christ. You know, those are broad categories of thinking about what the function of the church is or what she does. I think when we think about a healthy church, we're thinking about these expressions, these things are coming out of her regularly. and it becomes a natural overflow of the individual believers week by week, and then allowing that corporate time together. It's not an either-or, it's a both-and. Of daily, walking with the Lord of worship and fellowship and ministry, all these things, and then coming together corporately and doing them as well. So, as we're talking about these ideas of a church and what makes her healthy, in a mature church, one head, one authority, two servants, four marks of maturity for the new church plant, self-governing, self-supporting, self-reproducing, self-correcting, and then five functions. of worship, fellowship, ministry, mission, and discipleship. So as with all the others, we have the goals, goals that we want to set, you know, of seeing realistic things taking place within this body. Okay. It's almost, it's about 10 till three. Let's take a quick break and then come back. Let's come back right at three o'clock and then we'll wrap it up. We'll be done. We might get done a little early because if we're going to get through the devotional or the practical, this one is not real long either, so.